+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Maybe like an astronomer who has detected an anomaly in the sky, I have my telescope trained upon the spot where this ‘irregularity’ first appeared.  I watch it hoping that someday what I learn will turn what seemed so strange into something that is just plain ordinary.

Trauma triggers are often like that for me.  Even if I can detect what the trigger actually was, I don’t usually understand how the trauma trigger and my reaction to it are even connected.  So I train my inner telescope on both the trigger and my reaction to it, hoping that in time whatever the trigger turns out to be can be made benign to me.  Maybe someday at least that trigger will no longer create any reaction in me at all.

Yet today I feel my ‘crater’ inside, my ‘black hole’ of deep and enduring sorrow.  I didn’t feel it yesterday.  Why it is resonating within me so strongly today?

As I track backwards in time (and event) I realize that what I suspect triggered my deep sorrow was not a ‘single thing’.  The trigger was actually an accumulation of experiences that I never knew were even related – until my inner telescope showed me that they WERE connected.  These seemingly tiny triggers all seem to add onto one another until – like a log jam that can grow so big it can change the course of a river – suddenly I find myself ‘somewhere’ inside of myself that I don’t want to be.

++

A cumulative trigger can show me something helpful if I know how to look at it.  But this looking can be difficult when I am in the middle of my reaction to the trigger!

What I see THIS time is that as I encounter people in the world around me I am often comparing myself to them on some level I am not even aware of, and I come up lacking.  Then I begin to notice in someone else’s honestly cheerful approach to life, or in their competent management of their life and resources that keeps them from poverty, or in their ability to maintain a stable partner relationship – whatever the POSITIVE is that I detect in someone else I see myself having lost my own ground to the negative.

++

As a severe infant-child abuse survivor I understand that whatever I was given in my earliest environment was enough to keep me physically alive, but not enough to allow me to gain ground in important ways that ALL non-infant abuse survivors (in particular) have.  I know enough now to translate this thought into its truest meaning:  I did have resiliency factors available to me that kept me alive, and inner ones that kept my self intact (although not integrated into my body-world).  At the same time my earliest environment of severe abuse by my mother created overwhelming risk factors that – in truth of fact – could not possibly balance themselves out with an equal ‘number’ of resiliency factors.

In other words, I was robbed of what I desperately needed to grow up as a happy, healthy infant-child.  Being robbed changed the course of my physiological development so that today there are certain abilities non-abused, non-traumatized (during their earliest years) people take absolutely for granted.

Why should it occur to these people to appreciate or be grateful for what they received as infants and children?  WE NOTICE!  We severe early abuse survivors DO NOTICE – and I suspect that we have ALWAYS noticed that other people have ‘things’ we do not have – because they were given these things just as every little person SHOULD be given them.  These ‘things’ we were robbed of (at the same time we lived in an environment of pain-filled terror) were not trivial extras.  They were essential to the growth and development of an optimal human being.

++

It has never occurred to me so clearly as it has today that being around BOTH ‘optimally formed’ people AND being around sad and troubled people that were obviously deprived in their own earliest years of what they needed to grow up ‘well’ are BOTH triggers for my own grief and sadness.

I can’t go back and change what happened to me in the first critical months/years of my development that so changed the body-brain I live with.  What I want to achieve is some kind of immunity against the triggering of my deep, deep grief-filled sadness that lies within every cell of my body and that can snag me out of a day of ‘well-being’ like a gigantic fish-hook that captures me and drags me down to the bottom of the sea.

++

In case I might try to take a simplistic and erroneous path toward my hoped-for goal, I have an image that appears to me every time I think I am ‘making a mountain out of a molehill’.  I see a young child, one old enough to notice, having been invited to a birthday party.  The child is left out of all the games and laughter, ignored like it is invisible.  When it is time to sit at the table for lunch and cake with the other children, who all gaily giggle with their party hats on, everyone else is served the party sustenance while this single child receives nothing (not even a party hat)!

In our culture I believe we are trained not to complain (or ‘envy’ others).  The child says nothing.  Nobody even notices what is happening.  The child experiences all this sadness, and to make matters worse it does so ALONE.

I do not wish to blame my own self for noticing the deprivations and traumas, the horrendous abuse, or minimize anything that happened to me or be ashamed to speak my own truth.  Just because very few if any people want to hear what our reality was (and is) doesn’t mean our reality doesn’t matter.  When the contrast between non-abused people and our reality as survivors strongly catches our attention – when we notice consciously or not that there is difference between us – I believe those experiences of contrast will most often trigger our trauma in our body memory.  Being as aware as possible when this is happening might be able to thwart a full-blown trauma ‘allergy’ attack in reaction to these subtle (and very common) and extremely powerful triggers.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

++++++++++++++++++++++++++

A corner of my thoughts has been with those in northern Japan who are enduring the great trauma (see video footage of water here) caused by the Tsunami created by the massive earthquake last Friday, March 11, 2011.  Japan lies on the ‘Pacific Ring of Fire’:  “About 90% of the world’s earthquakes and 80% of the world’s largest earthquakes occur along the Ring of Fire.”

I was 12 in 1964 when the great earthquake struck Alaska, and how well I remember that experience.  Yet to me, a survivor of severe and nearly continual child abuse, the aftermath of that earthquake actually felt good to me.  My mother, like most adults in Alaska at the time, was completely focused on that disaster, which meant she completely ignored me.  Being ignored felt like heaven to me.

Yet as overwhelming an experience as a major earthquake and tsunami can be, that kind of trauma – not one caused by human beings – is actually easier to bear and heal from for people than is a major trauma of the other kind – one that IS caused by humans.

When I think of severe infant-child abuse I always think about it within the realm of great traumas, knowing that all the parameters of suffering, distress, terror, pain and confusion are actually greatly increased for young infants and children when faced with trauma caused by the very people who are supposed to love and care for them.

Even though today was a gorgeous day, and I spent all of it outside working toward being able to plant my garden, I could not entirely block out my awareness that there are things happening to others of all ages around this nation and this globe that are causing them to suffer.  I am very glad that I believe in the spiritual power of prayer to help all of us, even though most of what happens in this lifetime remains a Great Mystery to me.

As I work hard and humbly with my hands in the dirt I know there is a God that cares about everyone and about everything.  I ask that God to help all of us this whole world over.

++

Why is there no looting in Japan?

Discipline in the face of disaster: no looting in Japan

“Three days after a magnitude-9 killer quake devastated Japan, triggering Pacific-wide tsunamis and a likely nuclear plant meltdown and then consigning millions of Japanese to darkness, thirst and hunger in the wintry cold, I still have yet to read reports of widespread looting,” wrote Frederico D. Pascual Jr. of The Philippine Star. “This Filipino watching 3,200 kilometers from Ground Zero finds this disciplined behavior of a huge population in distress awe-inspiring. Let us pray that they stay that way — and that we learn from them.“

++++++++++++++++++++++++++

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

My company-related thoughts concerning my experiences of this past week have come to include what I am trying to learn and understand about the interplay between our human attachment and our caregiving systems.  It is most common for those of us who are survivors of severe infant-child abuse to have a body-brain that was changed in its physiological development in such a way that our stress-distress (insecure attachment) system works differently from ‘normal’.

Our ‘warning’ system shows its nearly continual activation through our patterns of attachment to self, others and to our world around us as it manifests in our insecure attachment patterns that are very difficult to ‘turn off’.  This means that when we ‘caregive’ we are accomplishing this feat in different ways from ‘normal’.  A body-brain built in a safe and secure earliest attachment-relationship environment will activate when ACTUAL threat exists in the environment.  At other times it will turn itself off and caregiving smoothly happens within these times.

These two systems — our attachment system and our caregiving system — are not ordinarily designed to operate at the same time.  Once our attachment needs are met the system turns off (and body-felt anxiety all but disappears).  I believe many people, especially parents, can react appropriately in caregiving their offspring because they can accomplish BOTH system activations at the same time.  Experts refer to Earned Secure attachment when this happens.  Based on my own experience I call this Borrowed Secure attachment.

When it comes to adult-to-adult interactions it can be harder to gain clarity about how these two systems are operating within relationships.  Needing ‘more than normal’ is an understandable and very normal consequence stemming from abuse, trauma, neglect and maltreatment of infants and children.  Gaining clarity about WHAT we need, WHEN we need, HOW we need, and WHO we feel we need what from are part of our never-ending healing process.

Give and receive is what our rupture-repair patterns are about.  I am very clear about how these patterns work when I am in interaction with children, but am having to learn as much as I can about adult interactions that seem foggy to me in these areas.  In the meantime as I continue to learn, I try to achieve a gentle forgiving stance that is most clearly connected to this thought as I struggle in adult relationships:  “Linda, this isn’t the end of the world!”

From the time I was born everything in my universe felt like ‘the end of the world’ or ‘the world is ending NOW (or very soon)’.  Just taking a breath, backing up from the specific details of a troublesome experience and giving myself time to process accomplishes a lot for me!  The experience of the passage of TIME itself becomes altered in the midst of trauma.  I try today to literally manage time so that it slows down.  In that slowing down I can allow more and more information into the picture that can help me gain a better, clearer perspective about what matters most — and what doesn’t.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++